Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There are also still a bunch of people who came up with that stuff the first time around who thanks to the Western world’s lowered standards for what constitutes adult behavior are hitting their thirties still concerned about whether or not they’re still cool and with it, and that could be a problem. They have a vested interest in throwing the golden glow of nostalgia–excellent for covering up blemishes–on a period of time that was not exactly paradise or anything for the sake of impressing the new regime of who decides what’s cool and what’s not....

Thursday30 The CleanChris Potter Friday1 Atari Teenage RiotEelsChris Potter Saturday2 Bettye LavetteMoon DuoCharlie MusselwhiteChris Potter Sunday3 Elizabeth Mitchell & You Are My LoverChris PotterPrince Rama Tuesday5 SwansTeenage FanclubWee Trio Wednesday6 Jason Adasiewicz’s Sun RoomsBobby Bare Jr. Update: 10/6 show canceled, 10/7 still onTeenage Fanclub CHRIS POTTER When I saw guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel at the Jazz Showcase last year, the large audience was dominated by young men, many apparently accompanied by their fathers; I figured most of them were aspiring jazz guitarists, and they were clearly in awe of Rosenwinkel’s masterful technique and resplendent harmonies....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s understood that Mickle Maher builds fascinating plays out of unlikely materials—connecting a presidential debate with Albert Camus’s The Stranger, for instance, or putting Beethoven and Quasimodo together on a panel about Chekhov. And it’s no secret that Colm O’Reilly has brought a rare proficiency to his performances in those plays. But both Maher and O’Reilly break through to new levels with An Actor Prepares, Maher’s script named for a textbook written by fabled Russian theater artist Konstantin Stanislavski....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Traditionally the Second was a solidly black ward. Running south from the Loop along the lake to about 35th Street, it was represented by significant figures in local political history, including Oscar DePriest, the city’s first black alderman. But after two decades of gentrification, more and more whites have moved south of the Loop, changing the ward’s demographics....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Logan Square is diving into the deep end of the local, seasonal, sustainable pool. This summer the three-year-old Logan Square Farmers’ Market is divesting from the city’s market program and going independent, along the lines of the Green City Market. According to Logan Square Chamber of Commerce executive director Josh Deth, local control of the market can benefit both farmers (who’re assured of a solid base of neighborhood support) and shoppers (who’re assured a regular base of vendors)....

Dena Lyons, local painter, is impressed by: Packer Schopf exhibit The Packer Schopf Gallery is currently exhibiting four fantastic and wondrous artists. Jerry Bleem weaves and crochets postconsumer plastic bags into beautiful and magical objects like a three-dimensional flower garden. Jeff Crisman represents the tattoo culture through his photographs of individuals in the context of their respective habitats. Crisman brings out the nature of the profound characters underneath the surface of their painted skin....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This week, the French romance drama Blue Is the Warmest Color opened in two Chicago theaters, Landmark’s Century Centre in Lakeview and the Century 12/CineArts 6 in Evanston. I reviewed the film when it played at CIFF, and I really don’t care for it. Director Abdellatif Kechiche has a weighty, methodical style that frequently undercuts what’s meant to be a passionate love story between two young lesbians....

My conversation with Jackie Leven was a long and fruitful one. Here are some fragments about his life at the margins of the London punk scene in the 70s and 80s: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I was about ten years older than most people on the scene and had absorbed a lot of influences that put me quite a bit aside from it, but I also really admired a lot of the punk singers and the rawness they brought to it, and even the cunningness with which some of the very good singers in punk disguised how good they really were....

Last year Brooklyn-based rap duo Das Racist, aka Himanshu Kumar Suri and Victor Vazquez, achieved Internet memehood with their bizarre, hilarious, and strangely profound “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell,” which they released again this spring on the mix tape Shut Up, Dude. As goofy and stoned-sounding as that song is, though, they’re actually incredibly smart dudes, and they’ve showed it off (among other places) in an article for the Village Voice on the nature of Internet fame and in a widely read rebuttal of Sasha Frere-Jones’s notorious New Yorker essay on what he sees as the end of hip-hop as an engine of pop-music innovation....

Q I’m a straight guy, and my first girl was very experienced—she was proud to say she’d been with at least 30 guys before me. When all was said and done, she said that I was the most well endowed of any man she’d seen before. Q I just got off the phone after another long-distance fight—I mean discussion—with my mother regarding her godson, my cousin “A.” I am sure (and my brother and father agree) that A is gay, like his dad (long story)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One of my favorite bands out of Cleveland right now is Pleasure Leftists, a four-piece who have caught onto the goth/new wave revival and do it better than pretty much anyone else out there. Last month they released a self-titled 12-inch EP on the usually hardcore-leaning Deranged Records, and today’s 12 O’Clock Track is the disc’s highlight, “Not Over....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s that time of year again when music fanatics, record collectors, bloggers, and journalists all start building lists of the year’s best, the year’s most memorable, and the year’s most forgettable. Being in this boat, I’ve been trying to figure out my lists as well, and my mind keeps coming back to Numero Group’s Buttons: From Champaign To Chicago compilation, which has spent almost a solid couple of months on my turntable....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I never would have guessed the power that social media bestows on not just the press, but the general public. Many music writers I follow have between 1,000 and 5,000 followers—some go into five or six digits. Individually, those signals may not register with much of an impact, but collectively, they’re a powerful force. With Facebook commenting and Twitter tracking and Tumblr reblogging, the conversation surrounding pop music reaches out further than ever before....

festival Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The 19th annual African Festival of the Arts runs Friday through Monday in Washington Park at 51st and Cottage Grove. Presented by the Africa International House, it features music on three stages in a range of genres, among them jazz, blues, hip-hop, neosoul, gospel, and traditional African. (At press time the DJs on each stage had not been confirmed....

On Monday and Wednesday nights at Hyde Park’s Cove Lounge, you can order an Old Style from a bartender with a very old style. A slight man in big glasses who speaks in a deep rasp, 90-year-old Daisuke Miyagawa is the kind of stoic barkeep you’d expect in a smoky postwar joint packed with men in bowlers grabbing a drink before the 5:02. Quiet, efficient, and with a scornful eye for dusty counters, “Dike” still gets a respectful fist bump from the staff and regulars....

The Reader’s Choice: Homolatte Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s a simple formula: One queer writer plus one queer musical act, an all-ages venue, and a tip jar from Ikea. Oh yeah—and a magnanimous and community-minded host like Scott Free, master of ceremonies at Chicago’s longest running and, to my mind, best queer variety showcase. After eight and a half years and five other venues, Homolatte seems to have settled into a comfy relationship with Michelle Fire’s Tweet restaurant (and its sister bar, Big Chicks)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The bulk of this week’s show recommendations in Soundboard happened over the past weekend, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t other worthwhile music to check out in the coming days. Remarkable singer Angel Olsen gives a homecoming concert on Monday at the Burlington following a short east-coast tour, including a stop in New York that earned a glowing rave from Ben Ratliff in the Times, and Monday’s weekly Robbie Fulks gig at the Hideout features Jon Langford of the Mekons....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Update on the possibility of a Richard J. Daley movie being filmed in Michigan: Chicago Film Office director Richard Moskal is in Los Angeles working to bring some business back, as is Michigan Film Office director Janet Lockwood. (No word on whether they’ve had occasion to sit down and talk politics or arm-wrestle for the rights to upcoming productions....

Erez Avissar Death Grips at Boiler Room Just a couple of days after their set at the online live music series Boiler Room’s party at SXSW, Sacramento anarcho-rap group Death Grips released a video for “Lock Your Doors” from their No Love Deep Web mixtape that they had filmed during the performance. Much of it’s disorientingly abstract, but it also gives viewers a chance to share lunatic drummer Zach Hill’s POV behind the kit, which is great if you’re one of those people who wishes they could be Zach Hill....

From one of Bodurin’s mixed-media animations On Sunday at 6:30 PM Black Cinema House, the south-side organization devoted to presenting “screenings and discussions of underseen works by film and video makers of the African and other diasporas,” will present a program entitled Fables of the Future, a collection of animated works by local artist Adebukola Bodunrin. The four shorts explore themes of “language, culture, and media,” manipulating found images through digital and manual techniques....